William Phillips
THE NATIVE
It
was our first trip to Mexico, and though I was de–
termined to avoid all sight-seeing, which I had always regarded as a
form of slavery to one's eyes and feet, Edna and I soon found our–
selves trotting day and night from one landmark to another. Using
Mexico City as the home base, we made quick thrusts into the sur–
rounding countryside under the illusion that, unlike other North
Americans, we were looking for the bona fide natives.
It
did not
take us long to discover that our bold sallies were always on the
beaten track, for no sooner had we arrived at some seemingly remote
Indian settlement than we found ourselves in a party of fifty tourists,
armed with Baedekers, binoculars, cameras, and a contingent of
guides, whose only purpose, apparently, was to maintain the fiction
that we were exploring the dark interior of the country.
One morning, therefore, after deciding to strike out on our own,
we found ourselves on a train bound for Oaxaca. Lying about one
hundred and fifty miles south of Mexico City, in the heart of the
desert, Oaxaca was a small town, where, we had been told, many
of the folkways of the Indians were still preserved. The train, which
looked like an elongated trolley car, lumbered along, through end–
less stops and slowdowns, twisting around the mountain peaks out–
side of Mexico City, miraculously holding its tracks until it slid down
into the flat heat of the desert. Many of the people on the train were
poor Mexicans and Indians moving their family and their belongings,
most of which were stuffed into large, greasy sacks, to some new home
along the way. At lunch, large tortillas were taken out of newspapers,
torn into pieces and passed around to each member of the family.
Then the mothers, aged and beaten by poverty and the tropical sun
that makes them mothers at fifteen and grandmothers at thirty, un–
concernedly bared their large, tawny, flaccid breasts and nursed their
